sacto joe

avon b7 said:

sacto joe said:

nubus said:

It is surprising that Tim Cook and C-level management at Apple are so much out of tune with ethics and politics outside US. Last week Google paid $1.1bn to France in taxes and fines. Apple paid less than competitors which is anti-competitive and against the core design of EU = not going to be tolerated at all.

The EU commission is elected by 27 governments. If you go against the commission... well... then you mess with the governments of 27 nations. And they just agreed to ask the competition commissioner of the last 5 years to continue. It is totally unheard of, but she now has 5 more years in the job! Not only that. She got promoted to executive vice-president of the EU Commission with the added responsibility of... everything digital. Why is it that Tim Cook does his outmost to stay on her bad side? In local TV she ridiculed him for being half her height - shown with a hand gesture (sorry... no link but it was rather rude). Unlike Trump the lady is not for turning. With Apple having a focus on privacy she could be the best thing that happened to Apple. Instead she is the worst.

Just pay the taxes and spend the same amount on wind farms from and in her home country with some words about the importance of contributing locally. And then start talking privacy... she could completely disrupt the business model of Google, Facebook etc.

Balderdash. A US corporation that sells products in another country is taxed in that country on the product it sells in that country. Same with other countries selling products to the US. Foreign corporations, otoh, just like US corporations, are taxed in the country of corporate ownership.

The $14.4 B in this case amounts to a power grab on potential US tax income. It will either revert to Ireland’s government or the US government. It is essentially the EU saying that Apple holding it’s corporate cash in Ireland means Apple should pay a corporate tax there.

It beggars belief that posters here can know so little and yet post so authoritatively.

It is far from a power grab. There was a three year investigation (and Apple of course wasn't the only company investigated).

The investigation followed very clear  guidelines and a summary was made public. Now the case will be heard.

Up to now we have known very little about the details so making broad claims about power grabs doesn't make a lot of sense because it based on nothing. The truth is there was a thorough investigation and now both sides will present their views. Further down the line we will learn the outcome but one thing should be clear the EU doesn't do power grabs.

nubus said:

It is surprising that Tim Cook and C-level management at Apple are so much out of tune with ethics and politics outside US. Last week Google paid $1.1bn to France in taxes and fines. Apple paid less than competitors which is anti-competitive and against the core design of EU = not going to be tolerated at all.

The EU commission is elected by 27 governments. If you go against the commission... well... then you mess with the governments of 27 nations. And they just agreed to ask the competition commissioner of the last 5 years to continue. It is totally unheard of, but she now has 5 more years in the job! Not only that. She got promoted to executive vice-president of the EU Commission with the added responsibility of... everything digital. Why is it that Tim Cook does his outmost to stay on her bad side? In local TV she ridiculed him for being half her height - shown with a hand gesture (sorry... no link but it was rather rude). Unlike Trump the lady is not for turning. With Apple having a focus on privacy she could be the best thing that happened to Apple. Instead she is the worst.

Just pay the taxes and spend the same amount on wind farms from and in her home country with some words about the importance of contributing locally. And then start talking privacy... she could completely disrupt the business model of Google, Facebook etc.

lkrupp said:

SpamSandwich said:

Maybe in a year or two, when the Foundation series is available I’ll be more interested. Do the producers of this show believe young people are idiots incapable of relating to historically accurate portrayals of people? Although a work of fiction with a bit of horror-fantasy thrown in, the hit movie “The Witch” showed a fairly historically accurate version of early American settler life, language and beliefs and it managed to be completely engrossing.

All this “I’m not interested” from the peanut gallery accompanied by the usual pre-fail and DOA pronouncements. What will it take to convince the naysayers that they do not represent the public at large. Almost every single one of that group’s predictions never happened, from the iPhone X, to the iPhone XR, to the not-yet-released iPhone 11 Max,  Apple Music,  Arcade,  TV+. Nobody knows what the content will look like, how good or bad it is, how much of it there will be or if there will be a back catalog of movies and TV series to go along with it. The naysayers make assumptions based on their own personal bias and what the rumor mill vomits up. At least I’m willing to wait until I actually experience it to make my opinion known instead of declaring I”ll check back in a couple of years because it will be a failure at first anyway. But hey, let’s make fun of Apple’s apparent decision to produce family oriented content with the attitude of “If I can’t watch explicit sex, nudity, graphic violence then I’m not interested."

22july2013 said:

As I've been saying for years, Disney is the biggest threat to Apple over the next ten years. Nothing wrong with that. Competition is good. But you can't have major competitors sharing members on their respective boards of directors because that's a conflict of interest.

Disney is competing with Apple (very soon) on selling streaming video, and Disney is likely to crush Apple (into Apple Sauce) in this area. But Disney also owns the company that makes Hero Pro cameras, and it's a small step for them to take that capacity and start producing hardware like a video streamer. Because of Disney's content, they could probably crush both the Apple TV hardware and Apple TV+ services. And maybe other things like Apple Arcade, or Apple News, in a few years.